School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemAwareness and practice of patient's rights law in Lithuania.(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2006-09-02)BACKGROUND: Patient's rights law is intended to secure good medical practice, but it can also serve to improve understanding between patients and medical staff if both were aware of their rights. METHODS: Awareness and practice of the new patient's rights law in Lithuanian health care institutions was explored through a survey of 255 medical staff and 451 patients in the four Kaunas city medical units in 2002. Participation rates were 74% and 66%, respectively. RESULTS: Majority of the medical staff (85%) and little over one half of the patients (56%) had heard or read about the Law on Patient's Rights (p < 0.001). Only 50% of professionals compared to 69% of patients thought information for patients about diagnosis, treatment results and alternative treatments is necessary (p < 0.001). A clear discrepancy was indicated between physicians informing the patients (80%-98% of physicians) and patients actually knowing (37%-54%) their treatment prognosis, disease complications or possible alternative treatment methods. CONCLUSION: These results suggest a need for awareness-raising among patients to improve the practical implementation of the Patient's Rights Law in Lithuania.
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ItemFamily Size, Family Type and Student Achievement: Cross-National Differences and the Role of Socioeconomic and School Factors(University of Toronto Press, 2006)This paper examines the effects of family size and family type on student achievement in reading and mathematics using data from 30 countries. In most countries, socioeconomic background accounts for a sizable part of the effects of family size on student achievement. There was little evidence for the resource dilution explanation to account for the effects of family size. Socioeconomic background and, in many countries, material resources account for much of the effect of a single-parent family. In contrast, these economic factors account for less of the effect of a reconstituted family. Students from larger, single-parent and reconstituted families tend to be located in the academically weaker parts of the school system. The countries that show stronger effects for family size are not the same countries that show stronger effects for family type. The negative effects on student performance of a single-parent and reconstituted family tend to be stronger in more economically developed countries.
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ItemIran's nuclear programme and the west(Informa UK Limited, 2006-05)
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ItemAfter 1989, Who Are the Czechs?(Informa UK Limited, 2006-12)
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ItemA new turn to authoritarian Rule in Russia?(Informa UK Limited, 2006-02)
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ItemArchaeologies of Anti-Capitalist Utopianism(Arena Printing and Publications, 2006)In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson anticipates the emergence of “cognitive mapping” of a new and global type’ and explains this as a code-word for class consciousness ‘of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind’. This paper explores Jameson’s concept of ‘cognitive mapping’ to suggest that, at the end of the 1990s, the world witnessed the first glimmerings in radical political practice of precisely such mapping in the efforts of the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate globalisation movement. The utopian dimension to this movement is explored through examination of the declared aims in its rhetoric and the euphoric responses to its potential by its participants. The practical significance of utopian extremism in political agitation is then investigated through consideration of the impact of the anti-capitalist/anti-corporate globalisation movement on the institutions and systems it confronted.
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ItemThe Sydney riots(BERGHAHN JOURNALS, 2006-06)This article describes the recent Sydney riots and the commentary surrounding them. The author demonstrates how, through processes of ‘analytical et nic cleansing’, ‘ethnic homogenization and specification’, and ‘blame displacement’, the Lebanese Muslim community, a target of the initial rioters, came to be victimized in commentary on the riots. While the riots may not have been particularly significant in themselves, the commentary surrounding them provides an important window onto the state of cultural politics in Australia at a specific juncture in time when multi-culturalism is simultaneously hegemonic but subject to attack from Australia’s ruling federal political regime. The author claims, moreover, that the victimization of Lebanese Muslims is indicative of a particular current process in which a discourse of multi-culturalism, engendered largely by its liberal advocates and drawing on the scholarly works of anthropologists and other social scientists, is utilized to undermine multi-culturalism as a form of social policy and organization.
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ItemContesting the injuries of class(Informa UK Limited, 2006-01-01)
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ItemTHEORIZING THE UNIVERSITY AS A CULTURAL SYSTEM: DISTINCTIONS, IDENTITIES, EMERGENCIES(WILEY, 2006-08)Abstract Universities currently face new environmental demands and significant internal complexities that appear to challenge their traditional modes of work and organization — and thus their very identities. In this essay, Mark Considine argues that the prospect of such changes requires us to reflect carefully upon the theoretical and normative underpinnings of universities and to delineate the structures and processes through which they might seek to negotiate their identities. Considine re‐theorizes the university as a higher education system composed by distinctions and networks acting through an important class of boundary objects. He moves beyond an environmental analysis, asserting that systems are best theorized as cultural practices based upon actors making and protecting important kinds of distinctions. Thus, the university system must be investigated as a knowledge‐based binary for dividing knowledge from other things. This approach, in turn, produces an identity‐centering (cultural) model of the system that assumes universities must perform two different acts of distinction to exist: first, they must distinguish themselves from other systems (such as the economy, organized religion, and the labor market), and, second, they must operate successfully in a chosen resource environment. Ultimately, Considine argues that while environmental problems (such as cuts in government grants) may generate periodic crises, threats within identities produce emergencies generating a radical kind of problematic for actor networks.
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ItemRisk, Affect and Emotion(Freie Universität Berlin, 2006)